Our Limnologists collaborated on the river biodiversity study published in the NATURE

11 Aug 2023 Zuzana Jayasundera

The work published in the prestigious journal NATURE, on which Petr Pařil, Marek Polášek, Michal Straka and Zoltán Csabai from the Faculty of Science MU Department of Botany and Zoology participated, showed that while aquatic invertebrate communities have recovered in line with improvements in water quality since the 1990s, this positive trend almost stopped around 2010.

“Climate change may have played an important role in this slowdown”, explained hydrobiologist Petr Pařil, “as the restoration of communities was significantly slower in rivers that were warming more quickly. The onset of new types of pollution, such as pharmaceutical residues and microplastics, may also be to blame”.

As the editorial comment in the journal NATURE pointed out, the results suggest that insufficient remediation of alterations caused by earlier flow regulation, dam construction and the drainage of entire river basins could also be preventing full river biodiversity restoration.

Scientists from across Europe led by prof. Haase from Germany examined pan-European trends in abundance and taxonomic and functional diversity of invertebrate communities using a comprehensive dataset of nearly 2 000 time series containing ca 27 000 samples collected in river systems in 22 European countries between 1968 and 2020. The study sought to answer two research questions: 1. How the abundance, taxonomic and functional diversity of freshwater invertebrate communities have changed over the last five decades in European rivers. 2. What environmental factors have caused these changes.